Legal humor. Seriously.

November 14, 2007

Government Matches O'Melveny's 239-Page Tome

About a month ago I mocked Jeff Skilling's appellate team, not for the quality of what they said to the court but because it took them 239 pages to say it. (I enjoyed the fact that the word count made the brief roughly half the length of Huckleberry Finn.) Today it was reported that prosecutors managed to nearly match the titanic output of the wordsmiths at O'Melveny.

The government's brief is just 218 pages long, according to its numbering, although if you count up all the tables and everything it comes out to 238 pages, a remarkable coincidence. But this probably overstates the size of the brief, since the word-count certificate says that the brief weighs in at a puny 49,830 words, a full 9,000 fewer than the defense used.